Chicago Erlang Users - March 2012

March's meeting presents a rare opportunity to hear from one of Erlang/OTP's founding developers!

Lennart Öhman - one of the original Erlang/OTP developers - will take us through a brief history of Erlang followed by a reflection of how Ericsson uses Erlang today and what that means for the future of the language.

Lennart will present his findings and insight as a bona fide Erlang insider! Anyone interested in Erlang, either as a seasoned developer or as a language aficionado, should set this evening aside - it will be truly epic!

Lennart Öhman was part of forming the Erlang competence consultancy group within Ericsson in the 90s. He left Ericsson more than 10 years ago and now works with Erlang from the Swedish consultancy company Sjöland& Thyselius.

I wish Lennart Öhman would have had time to go into planned changes for Erlang and OTP. I should have asked about it during the Q&A. Maybe someone who knows could post about it on the mailing list?

Someone from the audience asked an excellent question about open source engagement as a way to give the world a chance to see that Erlang is in active use at Ericsson. Lennart Öhman replied that they have activity since moving to github, and get contributions for documentation and some improvements. He also noted that the OTP core developers keep an iron grip on the library. But my suggestion is that Erricson sponsor sprints similar to how the Python Software Foundation sponsors sprints for python development. Perhaps there could be encouragement for sprints for some of the web frameworks out there, etc. It has been a good thing for the python community, and maybe the erlang community would see the same benefit.